‘The Etruscan Smile’: Film Review

To say that Robert the Bruce suffers from poor timing would be an understatement. Not only does this film about the medieval Scottish king arrive a very long 25 years after Braveheart— of which it is a sort of unofficial spinoff — but it has the misfortune of following the recent, superior Netflix film Outlaw King, starring Chris Pine as the same character.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] An uncompelling spinoff of the director's 2017 film about women sentenced to death row, Sabrina Van Tassel's The State of Texas vs. Melissa interviews the family and supporters of Melissa Lucio, a woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.

[Note: In the wake of the Tribeca festival's postponement this year, The Hollywood Reporter is reviewing select fest entries that elected to screen digitally for critics.] Joshua Leonard's 2011 feature debut, The Lie, explored a sort of identity crisis that resulted when a new parent (Leonard) used his baby as an excuse to ditch work. The crisis starts earlier in Fully Realized Humans, which again sees Leonard and Jess Weixler playing a couple who perhaps shouldn't be trusted with a baby.

Imagine a Roald Dahl-type story of clever children circumventing monstrous adults, wrapped in a gothic tone of morbid absurdism not unlike Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now add a visual sensibility that lands somewhere between Edward Gorey and Wes Anderson, air-drop the result into the "Sugar Rush" videogame from Wreck-It Ralph and press play.

A teenage murder case recently relitigated on social media is sympathetically traced in Daniel H. Birnam's urgently felt Netflix doc.

"How long do you think we humans have?" asks filmmaker Jeff Gibbs to a series of random people at the beginning of his environmental-themed documentary, Planet of the Humans. That the question has since taken on a particularly sinister edge in the wake of COVID-19 is but one of the many ironies of the film made available for free on YouTube for 30 days, courtesy of executive producer Michael Moore.

A native of the place strangers call Easter Island amplifies a call for self-rescue in Eating Up Easter, Sergio M. Rapu's eco-themed documentary.

The 'Avengers: Endgame' producers tapped their stunt supervisor to direct a stock action script, relying on his ingenuity — and Chris Hemsworth’s commitment — to make it feel fresh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] For Dee's Tots Daycare in New Rochelle, New York, that last word in the mom-and-pop enterprise's name is a misnomer, or at least an understatement. The business of teaching, entertaining, feeding and straight-up loving a houseful of children who range from infants to tweens isn't limited to the daytime; it's a 24-hour operation.

Cluttered and downbeat but illuminating, this Michael Moore-produced environmental documentary looks at the "green power" movement and sees red.

Writer-directors Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as The Pierce Brothers) know exactly what they're doing in the creepy prologue to The Wretched, which unfolds 35 years ago as the camera crawls around a lawn on which old-school kids' toys — a knitted bunny, crayons, model cars, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik's Cube — lie abandoned in the rain. Inside the house, a babysitter arrives to find the flowers wilted and the mother of a young family busy committing a gruesome act in the basement.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.

Netflix releases a delightful, sugar-rush animated feature for families about an extremely dysfunctional family, one in which the kids conspired to orphan themselves.

Almost a century before the recent, wildly popular Hilma af Klint retrospective at New York's Guggenheim, the Swedish artist imagined a spiraling white temple, not unlike that Manhattan landmark, as the home for her paintings. Most of what she envisioned for her art was denied her during her lifetime, but af Klint, ever prescient and prolific, understood her work's power and importance and, planning for posterity, she managed, in a way, to have the last laugh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Israeli director Eytan Fox, who landed on the map with his 2002 gay military romance, Yossi & Jagger, brings sensitivity, restraint and slow-burn sensuality to a story of cross-generational emotional awakening in Sublet.

Shea Whigham plays a man with no name — but with plenty of overly diagrammed sin — in a small-town West Texas drama that's like a reductive bone-dry version of 'The Apostle.'

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] It's fitting that Wake Up on Mars opens in winter. The frozen Swedish landscape is an apt backdrop for this real-life tale of suspended animation: Two teenage sisters, in side-by-side beds, lie in a coma-like condition that's variously known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, apatisk (apathy) syndrome and resignation syndrome.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] With his chameleonic capacity for self-reinvention, his eclectic musical palette and elegant extraterrestrial freakdom, David Bowie would seem ideal subject matter for the kind of freewheeling, stylistically fragmented biopic treatment Todd Haynes gave Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

A one-joke, bad-taste concept is pulled off with some deadpan panache in this indie comedy "thriller."